latest posts

Jan 23, 2012

After playing around with Google Charts and doing some extensive C#/SQL integration with it for a dashboard last summer, I figured I'd give Telerik's Kendo a shot. If you're not familiar with Telerik, they produce very useful controls for WinForm, WPF, WP7 and ASP.NET controls (in addition to many others). If you do .NET programming, their product will save you time and money guaranteed. That being said, I started work on the first module for jcDAL last night and wanted to add some cool bar graphs to the web interface for the analyzer. About 15 minutes of reading through one of their examples I had data coming over a WCF service into the Kendo API to display this:
[caption id="attachment_880" align="aligncenter" width="621" caption="jcDBAnalyzer Screengrab showcasing Kendo"][/caption]
So far so good, I'll report back with any issues, but so far I am very pleased. A lot of the headaches I had with Google Charts I haven't had yet (+1 for Telerik).

Jan 11, 2012

After some more thought about jcBENCH and what its real purpose was I am going to drop the Solaris and IRIX ports. Solaris has a Mono port, but I only have Sun Blade 100 which has a single cpu. Not expecting a ton of performance from that. IRIX on the other hand, I have a Quad R14k 500 Origin 300, but no port of Mono exists. So I could port it to Java, but then you really couldn't compare benchmarks between the Mono/.NET versions. I am about 50% done with the Android port and am just waiting for the OpenSuse 12.1 compatible MonoDevelop release so I can get started on the Linux Port.
After those 2 ports are completed I am thinking of starting something entirely new that I have been thinking about the last couple years. Those that deal with a SQL database and write a data layer for his or her .NET project, know the shortcomings or doing either:

Using an ADO.NET Entity Model, adding your Tables, Views and Stored Procedures and then use that as is or extend it with some business logic

Use an all custom data layer using the base DataTable, DataRows etc, wrap your objects with partial classes and create a "factory"

Both approaches have their pros and cons, the first takes a lot of less time, but you also have a lot less control and could be costly with all of the overhead. Both however will eventually fall apart down the road. The reason, they were built for one audience and one production server or servers. How many times have you gone to your IT Manager and asked for a new Database server because it was quicker then really go back to the architecture of your data layer. As time goes on, this could happen over and over again. I have personally witnessed such an event. A system was designed and built for around 50 internal users, on a single cpu web server and a dual Xeon database server. Over 5 years later, the code has remained the same yet it's been moved to 6 different servers with ever increasing speed.
Times have changed and will continue to change, workloads vary from day to day, servers are swapped in and out, so my solution, an adaptive, dynamic data layer. One that profiles itself and uses that data to analyze the server to use either single threaded LINQ queries or PLINQ queries if the added overhead of using PLINQ would out way the time it would take only using one cpu. In addition using Microsoft's AppFabric to cache the commonly used intensive queries that maybe only get run once an hour and the data doesn't change for 24. This doesn't come without a price of course, having only architected this model in my head, I can't say for certain how much overhead the profiling will be. Over the next couple months, I'll be developing this so stay tuned. jcBENCH as you might have guessed was kind of a early test scenario of testing various platforms and how they handled multi-threaded tasks of varying intensity.